Sunday, August 07, 2011

Carmine Wins

29 comments:

I remember one Herman & Katnip cartoon where Herman hides a double-barreled shotgun in a nickelodeon. The protruding barrels now resemble the machine's binocular viewer. Enter Katnip. He presses his eyes against both barrels, cranks the handle - and gets the full shotgun blast in both eye sockets. Realistic, blood-curdling scream. The impact sends him offscreen to the opposite wall, where he collides with a mounted moose trophy, knocking out its glass eyes. (I'm not making this up.) Katnip reacts in horror to the eyeballs he sees rolling around on the floor, ("My eyes, my eyes!!") and frantically screws them into his own eye sockets. ("I can't SEE! I'm BLIND!") Cue the identical cousin mice laughing hysterically in the foreground while Katnip runs off into the horizon, knocking into things. Iris out.

How many kids went home with nightmares after that? Funny thing is, they're so well animated. I know this is WAY off-topic, but I almost wish you'd do a post about Harveytoons, and explain why they're so adamantly, profoundly unfunny. My pal Joe Suggs in Atlanta sent me this analysis recently:

"I could write ten thousand words about Herman and Katnip and never capture the essence. The closest I can get is that these cartoons were made by people with no discernible sense of humor, imitating other cartoons they've seen but didn't quite get. Even as a small kid I grasped this, though they're actually much more entertaining to me as an adult. These are the only Golden Age characters who seem capable of genuine suffering. One almost expects them to retain injuries and lost body parts from short to short. What would make them absolutely perfect is if they were in German, with English subtitles."

@Mike: You may be misremembering things a little bit. It sounds like you're referring to the 'Mouseum' short from 1956. I couldn't find the entire short online, but here's a very poorly rendered clip on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg_v16kIcVc

Film school students should have to watch H & K alongside Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin and Chuck Jones. The gags in H & K are all there in a mechanical way, but absent any sense of comedy: no timing, personality, or warmth; no funny switches once the gag is set up.

I can imagine how frustrating it would have been to try to explain to those guys why Tom buzz-sawing down a two-hundred foot tall pine tree with his crotch and screaming the Bill Hanna scream the whole way (in "The Flying Cat") is funny, but just (say) hitting the cat in the back of the head with a rifle butt isn't. "....Vas is das? Bot ve hid der katze wid der gon, giff him konkussion, making him to vomit! Is big loff on him, jah?" "Yah, Fritz, is big loff on him! Pooey on katze! Den ve make him blind!"

On a side note, if you read the Frank and Ollie book on cartoon gags, this is apparently how all non-Disney shorts looked to them (other than maybe Harman and Ising). They didn't like "pain" gags in any form.

@Johnathan:Yes, Mike is referring tot hat 1956 short. I actually think it'ds very funny. Sylvester, under Bob McKimson's direction, wasn't that much different than Katnip here, and I can easily imagine him doing the same thing.

BTW I rewatched it and it isd NOT a nickelodeon, Mike F. but an ELEPHANT trophy, and Herman TURNS Katnip's double-barrels around so that the bullets make with the U-turn. Other than that you remember right.. the ONLY remotely sick thing is that, like the 1962 Speedy and Sylvester, "Mexican Cat Dance" or "Chili Weatherr", the Sylvester as proxy-bull one, the mice act as a canned laughter track!!!!